this was 8 years ago, i reached it by googling how to save everything i type because a long inspired post got deleted by facebook today. i started using a mac in 1995 january, a quadra 605. it of course had a floppy drive, they all did then. My friend gave me a program he had called Now Utilities. It was a suite. The only one i used was Now Save. Now Save was elegant. In its settings you could tell it which applications you wanted it to save, i selected pretty much everything, the browser, the email program, Simple Text (the old Text Edit), Word. And it recorded every keystroke. If i backspaced to change something, the new version was the one saved. However i edited what i wrote, that would be saved, and there was a tab that brought up the saved documents. It saved me many times. The saved text was exactly like the document, nothing had to be edited, just copy and paste. Eventually with OS changes and hardware changes, i couldn't install Now Save anymore, i used it as long as i could. I couldn't imagine living without it. When i couldn't use it anymore, i googled (or whatever the search engine was then) 'keystroke saver" or something like that. i found an article in MacWorld magazine reviewing different examples of this kind of software. There were lots of them. I chose one or two, installed and picked one. Not as elegant as now save, clunkier, more awkward, not an exact replica of the document, but still, way better than losing the whole thing. The other one i installed gave you a copy of your document that had all you text, including what you backspaced over, plus it had weird characters like # @ & scattered all through it, it was a lot of work to edit it, but still better than losing the whole thing. I used that when the other one was discontinued. Some years had gone by and i googled the search terms again and there was a newer MacWorld article, reviewing the same kind of software again, with new programs. I got another one or two, they worked, never as easy or as good as Now Save but better than the previous ones. The last one of these i had and used for a long time was called BackTrack. It worked until Lion. I would have stayed with Snow Leopard forever (Rosetta, more versatility and functionality) but i finally got a new computer in late 2013, an MBP with Mountain Lion on it. No more rosetta, that condemned me to have to use Apple Mail, i don't know why they can't make a Mail program that is user friendly and straightforward, not your mother's Apple. And the other major loss was BackTrack. Since then, i can't find any more programs that do that. Periodically when i have a painful document loss, i google again, but no one seems to think that this is an important functionality to have. I have no tech knowledge but so given that, i don't see why typing couldn't be saved to the Cloud in documents chosen in iCloud preferences. But not only can i not find any programs that do that. I can't even find anyone who knows what they are or has ever heard of them. You can get key loggers which give you unintelligible short amounts of text to spy on kids and employees, that isn't something that would function as needed. At least not as far as i know or have been able to find out.
there must be a reason or reasons why nobody develops this functionality anymore. But i can't imagine what.
